I plan to read more literary novels. But sometimes I end up blowing through a cheesy thriller that I grabbed at the library. JJ buys kale to make healthy salads, and then we find ourselves eating frozen pizza on the couch. I add Kurosawa and Bergman movies to my Netflix list, but I also rewatch the same episode of Seinfeld for the fifth time because it makes me laugh, and I already know how it ends. I like to think I have standards. I know what "good" is, or at least I have some idea. But I’m...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Lately, I’ve been spending time with a new online tool called Cosmos. It’s a way to collect and curate visual inspiration—kind of like Pinterest, but without the ads, algorithms, and kitchen makeovers. What sets Cosmos apart is its focus: it’s filled with images curated by designers, illustrators, and artists. Real people with real taste. And the quality of what they’ve gathered is next level. I recommend you try it, but that’s not the point of this essay. As I meandered through the site, I...
15 days ago • 2 min read
I'm writing this under an enormous redwood tree in Northern California, a thousand miles from home. I’m in a friend’s backyard, having just slept in the top bunk of a tiny cabin. I had almond milk in my coffee and cottage cheese in my pancakes. Being a guest in someone else's home means making a hundred small adjustments—from the density of the pillows to the taste of the water. It reminds me how much of a creature of habit I’ve become. This is my first proper vacation in five years. A couple...
22 days ago • 2 min read
Why am I writing this essay? Because it’s almost Friday, and I always send out an essay each Friday. Because I’m a writer, and writers write. Because (most of the time) I love doing this—arranging ideas, picking words. Because I want to see the finished piece. And feel that sense of satisfaction. Because I do this for you. But more, I do this for me. But does it matter why I do this? Absolutely. Because if I mistake my motivations and I’m fuzzy on my goals, I could end up looking for answers...
29 days ago • 2 min read
When I was 27, I almost learned to play the piano. I’d gone to a dinner party, and the host—a film editor, not a musician—sat down at an old upright and played something slow and emotional. It wasn’t flashy. He used both hands, sure, but he wasn’t showing off. It sounded like he was speaking with the keys. I remember thinking: I want to do that. The next morning, I looked up local music teachers in the Yellow Pages. Then I paused. It would take years to get good. I imagined scales, clunky...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
For the last quarter century of his life, my grandfather spent hours each day at his word processor, writing recollections, essays, and articles. He had been a doctor, but like many aging artists and writers, he turned to the page to make sense of the life he had lived. Every decade, he wrote a new version of his autobiography—hundreds of pages of translucent, onion-skinned remembrance. Some he mailed to me or my mother, but most sat in desk drawers or binders, unread, unappreciated. When he...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Each morning, I would stagger out of bed and sit at my kitchen table with a journal and a pen. For the next fifteen minutes, I would fill three pages with whatever oozed out of my bleary brain — anxieties, questions, nightmares, prognostications. It was part of my quest for clarity and perspective, a journey that had led me through religion, philosophy, self-help, and finally to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Her book prescribed a weekly artist’s date and morning pages, and I had dutifully...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
” … I recently read, I forgot where, that gimmicky [drawing] methods, e.g. left-hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat 'finished', work. Meaning I can understand it is a great practice skill sharpener. And yet, I would probably be willing to agree that unusual limiting techniques are a bit gimmicky for finished art. But yet, some of the great pieces of history appear exactly as though one were altering his or her usual perceptions...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
As a small child, I would rearrange the books on my little bedroom bookcase by color and height, alphabetizing authors, titles, subjects — a four-foot librarian. A book has always been a place for me, more than just an object. A place of adventure, discovery, and safety. I can do anything inside a book and never worry about the consequences. Be a pirate, a wolf, an astronaut, a king. I would walk down the street reading, lost in my book, transported, bumping into trash cans and grown-ups’...
2 months ago • 2 min read